Strangers From the Sky (33 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” Jim Kirk responded almost humbly, daunted by her proximity for all her containment. “Right on both counts.”

T’Lera disregarded his attempt at lightness. “If I may be so bold: what are you, Mr. Kirk?”

“A friend,” Kirk said at once, without meaning to. He’d been running prepared speeches in his head for days. Where was his celebrated glibness when he needed it?

“Apparently our definitions of friendship are somewhat dissimilar,” T’Lera suggested.

Jim Kirk heard Jason chuckle. The captain had broken out the ship’s liquor supply; Kirk accepted a scotch on the rocks with silent gratitude.

“Perhaps it was a poor choice of words,” he told T’Lera. “Or a less-than-precise choice.” Damn! he thought. He’d learned nothing since his encounter with Spock on the bridge, was left falling over his tongue in an attempt to clarify himself. “Perhaps what I mean is that what I am is less important than what I am attempting to do.”

“Forgive me, Mr. Kirk,” T’Lera said dryly. “But the limits of my perspective render me unable to separate motivation from motivator.”

A sharp, humorless laugh announced Melody Sawyer’s arrival.

“Save your breath, Kirk! She can’t accept your help; you’re only human!” She plunked herself down next to Dehner, as far away from the Vulcans as she could be while still at the same table. “Thought it might be refreshing to eat with human beings again,” she announced, helping herself from the serving platters.

The Vulcans had the good grace to say nothing. Yoshi and Tatya looked embarrassed, and Jason Nyere looked as if he was about to chew Sawyer’s ears off.

“Does their presence threaten you, Commander?” Dehner asked ingenuously.

“It does not!” Melody snorted.

“Then why do you act out in such a hostile manner whenever they’re in proximity?”

“Listen, honey.” Melody pointed a fork at her. “You may be impressed with your own credentials, but I’ve got nearly twenty years on you and I don’t impress. You can look in my file; you’ll find I don’t suffer from paranoid delusions or feelings of persecution—”

“Just bad manners!” Jason rumbled.

“I have the perspicacity to recognize a threat when I see one, suh!” Melody barked back.

“What exactly do you see as the threat?” Jim Kirk chimed in, finishing his drink and changing direction. Maybe he’d struck out with the Vulcans, but a fellow human’s distrust of the alien was familiar territory. “I see us sharing a meal with two quiet, well-mannered fellow beings who have neither taken hostages, blown up our military installations, nor demanded that we ‘take us to your leader.’” Nyere was chuckling again. “I don’t understand—”

“What I ‘perceive as the threat,’” Melody mimicked him, “is what all those people up north looking for flying saucers are afraid of. It may not have a name, or maybe it does. Maybe it’s the simple deflation of ego accompanying the realization that we’re not supreme in this corner of creation. Maybe it’s the fear that everything we’ve fought through three world wars to preserve on this lowly little dustball will have to change now. Maybe it’s the idea that these people have watched us, learned our language, and happen to look a little like us, but they aren’t like us; in fact they take an inordinate self-inflating pride in
not
being like us. Maybe I sit here thinking ‘would I let my daughter marry one of them?’ I don’t know what it is; all I know is I don’t want it happening in my lifetime. And the response from the rest of the planet sure as hell indicates I’m not alone.”

That said, she put her food on a tray and stalked off. Jason looked as if he might be tempted to go after her, if only to dump her overboard in her underwear. He shook his head, put his fork down, and excused himself to return to his solitary vigil at the comm screen.

No one but Kirk ate much after that, and he unobtrusively, convinced that whatever lay ahead he’d need the strength for it. Tatya began to clear away the dishes; Yoshi and Sorahl retreated to one end of the table to consult over something on a computer printout. Elizabeth Dehner poured herself a cup of coffee and watched it grow cold at her elbow. In the galley, the last melancholy strains of “Lt. Kije” wafted away and no one bothered to replace the disk. The false euphoria was gone.

Only T’Lera, her hands folded in a configuration not unlike one Spock might have chosen, Kirk noted with a pang, sat unmoved and unmoving in the midst of emotional outburst or the disintegration in its aftermath, centered and certain. If he could get to the core of that certainty, Jim Kirk thought, and somehow challenge it—

He sighed. Here under the ice day and night were indistinguishable, but topside the sun would be going down about now. Another day shot to hell. He’d told his people it would be easy once he got to the Vulcans; here he was sitting right beside one of them and he had no idea what to do next.

He felt rather than saw T’Lera’s eyes on him.

My God, he thought. How often have I gotten that same look from Spock—assessing, weighing, and, I always assumed in my paranoia, finding me unworthy. But Spock’s gaze, however incisive, was always tempered with—with something; I’m not sure what. Certainly nothing as emotional as compassion, but something softening, mitigating. There is nothing soft in T’Lera’s gaze, nothing soft about T’Lera at all.

“You realize, Mr. Kirk, that Commander Sawyer is correct,” T’Lera said.

“I’m not so sure,” Kirk said, swallowing the last of his dinner and pushing the plate away. “There are at least as many humans who would welcome you, given the chance.”

“Provided we did not move in down the block,” T’Lera said dryly; she’d been getting a handle on the idiom after all, with Jason’s help. Across the table, Elizabeth Dehner tried not to choke on her cold coffee. “Tell me my presence does not make you uneasy, Mr. Kirk, and I will remember that humans have one skill Vulcans have never mastered, and that is their ability to stretch a truth.”

I’ve struck out twice in ten minutes, Kirk mused. What have I got to lose by going up a third time?

“Commander,” he began. “What can I say to persuade you?”

“Persuade me of what, Mr. Kirk? That your people are at best ambivalent about mine? Of this I need no reassurance.”

Kirk shook his head. “Of the fact that some of us want to help, and we may be empowered to get you off the planet, if only we can get you out of Antarctica.” He heard Dehner inhale sharply; he had no basis for making that last statement, but he made it anyway. He got as close to T’Lera as he dared. “I asked you a question yesterday at the inquiry, Commander; you never got a chance to answer it. What would you do if you were free to leave here?”

He saw Sorahl’s head go up, saw that Yoshi was listening, too.

“Is this an intellectual exercise, Mr. Kirk, or some manner of test?” T’Lera wanted to know. “I had thought the tests concluded with the departure of the inquiry panel. As to intellectual exercises…”

“Commander T’Lera, sometime over the next few days”—Kirk felt his temper simmering, decided to use it—“your fate, and your son’s”—he included Sorahl in the conversation—“is going to be decided for you, either by the United Earth Council or, God help you, by ‘public opinion,’ in the shape of whatever nosy reporters manage to sneak through the security cordon and find their way here. I’m offering you a chance out. I have no time for intellectual exercises!”

He subsided, wondering not for the first time if he’d blown it completely. T’Lera let the silence continue interminably, let it settle on them both, oppressive.

“Mr. Kirk,” she said at last. “What I have attempted to do to prevent this you know. What I am permitted by my conscience and by my oath to do next is contingent upon what is best for your world and for mine. Isolated from both in this place, I cannot accurately know what that is. Yours may be a simple question, but it has no simple answer.”

“All right,” Kirk acquiesced. Jason had left the liquor cabinet unsecured, and he helped himself. “Let’s say I’m simplifying matters for the sake of expediency. Let’s say I’m as aware as you of the danger here—not only to you and your son, but to both our worlds. Perhaps more aware than you can know.”

“Jim,” Elizabeth Dehner said correctly, in character, “you’re telegraphing again.”

“Why, Sally.” He grinned, also in character, returning to his seat with drink in hand. No, I wasn’t going to tell her who we really are! he thought, hoping she was reading him loud and clear. If I’d wanted a watchdog or a lecture on the Prime Directive, I’d have brought—well, Spock, if I could have. “Don’t you trust me?”

“As far as I can throw you!” Dehner said sweetly.

T’Lera, assuming this to be some human lovers’ quarrel, as Dehner had intended her to, lowered her eyes in respect for human privacy even in this public forum. Her high beams off him for the moment, Kirk stopped sweating and thought hard.

“Commander, I’m told your people pride themselves on logic, on the ability to predicate future occurrences based upon present events. Am I correct?”

“It is not a matter of pride, Mr. Kirk. These are our gifts, and we make use of them.”

“But you could, for example”—Kirk held his temper this time—“project a time when Earthmen, in the course of space exploration, would happen upon Vulcans or—others—out there. Assuming there are others out there.”

T’Lera was watching him closely. “Perhaps.”

“Then I put it to you that if your ship had not entered Earth’s atmosphere and crashed, and created who knows what repercussions in terms of human fears and misunderstandings, there would come a time in Earth’s technological evolution when we would reach out into space and encounter other technological life, whether Vulcan or not, if such life existed.”

“Mr. Kirk,” T’Lera answered. “Three of your years ago an Earth ship was launched toward the system you call Alpha Centauri. I suggest that your scientists would not have dispatched so dangerous, time-consuming, and costly a manned expedition without the expectation of finding intelligent life.”

“What do you think, Commander?” Kirk asked incisively. “Is there intelligent life on Alpha Centauri?”

“I have never been to Alpha Centauri, Mr. Kirk,” T’Lera replied, and Elizabeth Dehner excused herself to get another cup of coffee.

She’s not going to violate her Prime Directive, Kirk thought. Not even to the degree of revealing her knowledge of other life forms, not even if it could save her life. He had to admire her for it, at the same time he felt like throttling her for bringing him so close to violating his own. Was there no other answer?

“Hypothetically, Commander,” Jim Kirk began, feeling an extra gear kick in somewhere in the back of his brain as he found the persuasiveness he’d been searching for all evening. “Assuming your ship had not crashed, assuming the scoutcraft missions proceeded without incident, how long approximately—in your opinion—before Earthmen and Vulcans encountered each other?”

“Based upon your present level of technology and exploration correlative with ours,” T’Lera answered after the briefest moment of calculation. “Approximately 19.285 of your years.”

Practically down to the date and time! Jim Kirk marveled, wondering if the famed rescue mission by the
Amity
had been accident after all. He risked a glance at Dehner when she returned from the galley to see if she’d overheard. She had. And, Kirk realized, so had Sorahl.

“You know, it’s always amazed me,” Kirk mused, “the sacrifices in time space travelers are willing to make. The crew of the
Icarus
will take six years to get to Alpha Centauri and six to get back. I’m curious, Sorahl—how far is Vulcan from Earth?”

“Approximately 58,782,000,000,000 Earth miles, based upon our ship’s trajectory, Mr. Kirk.” The young Vulcan was too new at interaction with Earthmen to suspect the trap Kirk was laying for him.

Kirk whistled softly. Elizabeth Dehner wanted to hit him. “That’s quite a distance. How long did it take your ship to go that far?”

The young Vulcan knew his mother’s thoughts as he walked blindly into the trap. Perhaps, indeed, it was not yet time.

“Perhaps my commander could better answer that, Mr. Kirk,” he said politely, knowing it would not serve.

“But you were the navigator,” Kirk challenged him. “I’m asking you. That much distance—I’m no physicist but, my goodness, that comes out to about ten light-years, I think. You couldn’t have been in space that long; you’d have had to be a child when you left Vulcan. How long, Sorahl?”

The young Vulcan hesitated, though not out of doubt as to what answer he would give, only in search of a way to give it without offense. “With all due respect, Mr. Kirk, I cannot answer that question.”

“Nor will I, Mr. Kirk.” T’Lera was on her feet and Sorahl followed suit. “If you will excuse us—”

They were gone as silently as T’Lera had come. Jim Kirk pounded the table in frustration.

“
Am Morgen
.” Racher’s lips did not move when he spoke. His voice was metal against metal in the cold of the unheated outbuildings at Byrd. “When there is sun.”

“That’s nearly twelve hours!” one of his followers complained; Racher had forbidden heat flares lest they attract attention should anyone chance to look out from
Delphinus
’s conning tower.

They’d hidden their snowmobiles behind the ancient glacial ridge some hundred yards distant, waited for dark to creep and crawl across the ice to the deserted complex. They had not questioned why it was deserted; waited now, their attention focused on the grim gray conning tower jutting above the ice, giving barely a hint of how much ship lay beneath.

“
Ja
,” Racher replied, unperturbed. His bionic eyes were infrared-equipped; through the starboard port he could discern a human figure—Jason’s—alone in the dark of the bridge, and was tempted for the briefest moment. But he had built his reputation as a terrorist upon merciless dawn attack; he would not change that now.

“I want them to know who kills them. We breach from the conning tower.” He motioned with the muzzle of his favorite automatic; the laser rifle was only to impress thugs like Easter. “And we go in. Search and destroy. Everyone.”